Thursday, October 1, 2015

Twice I have spent some time in
Canterbury. Both, when I was there, were more triumphal parades than
pilgrimage, because of course everything was about me. The first was in the early 1990s as a part of
what I remember as the “Weasel’s Luck
Victory Tour”, the second a few years later, my circumstances heightened,
improved, and (I thought, even more arrogantly) changed entirely and for the
better. Visiting and re-visiting is an
odd form of pilgrimage, I think: your mind gathers anticipation, the
experience, and the memory of the first visit into the anticipation of the
second, and it becomes very much like Wordsworth records his experience of
Tintern Abbey in the famous poem:

These beauteous
forms,

Through a long
absence, have not been to me

As is a
landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in
lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and
cities, I have owed to them

In hours of
weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the
blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even
into my purer mind,

With tranquil
restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered
pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no
slight or trivial influence

On that best
portion of a good man’s life,

His little,
nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of
love.

These lines I have always taken to be the poet’s take not only on how
nature heals and cures you, but also of how memories, seen and unseen,
deep-buried to where you can scarcely summon them, continue to shape and define
your days like a form of imaginative karma.
And so it was that two trips to one of the most revered sites of
pilgrimage, spaced only a few years apart, shape me these days as I come to the
place for a third time—this time entirely in memory and reconfiguration. I
discover new lessons in those old journeys, and how a pilgrimage might shift
and move within your thoughts until it is equally immediate, equally vivid, but
meaning altogether something different from what you had expected it would
mean.

Let me begin with the second time there.
It was, in many ways, a marked improvement over the first. I was years wiser, had ended a bad marriage
and embarked on a second that, to this day, remains the best journey I have
taken. I was riding the crest of my most
critically successful book, Arcady,
and was literally commuting to London, where I dined with editors and relaxed
into seeing the London I had wanted to see on the first trip. Canterbury was a tranquil spot after these
hectic days, and we had a room that overlooked the cathedral close, so that the
mornings were peaceful as well, and quietly beautiful, the soft, glassy ringing
of bottles unloaded on doorsteps by the milkman, and the bells beginning at a
courteous hour, when the sun was fully up and we were, too, on our way to visit
the pedestrian-friendly streets around the cathedral.

We saw the Cathedral, and I remembered a special fascination with the
tomb of Edward the Black Prince, whose very militant Christian tomb was undermined
by the mourning faces of “green men”—Celtic vegetation spirits whose presence
on Edward’s catafalque were touching and at the same time rather funny, even
though they seem to weep over his death.

A death, by the way, that arrived a bit too soon. Edward ruled as the longest Crown Prince in
British history: serving ably, at times even brilliantly, commander in
victories over France in Crécy and Poitiers, he died a year before his father, and for all
his service, for all his place in the line of succession, never became
king. Perhaps the sculptor who carved
the green men did so not only in a spirit of mourning, but also in an awareness
of the rich irony of things.

For the time of the green men was over.
No doubt they never saw it coming.
They receded to forests, to moonlit crossroads, to catafalques where
they teased the One True Faith of the Black Prince with their leafy presence.

But theirs was not the only cultural subversion I saw in Canterbury. High on one of the arches is unobtrusively
carved a naked woman in a rather compromised posture. The story goes that the carving was the
sculptor’s revenge for having been stiffed in payment. Or so David Mitchell told me.

Yes, the David Mitchell. Cloud
Atlas, The Bone Clocks, among a
number of brilliant books. One of
Britain’s visionary young novelists, who is no doubt headed for literary
immortality as I write this. He was
“Dave” to me, though, on my first trip to Canterbury, where he was a clerk at
Waterstone’s, to whom I happened to mention that one of my books was sitting on
the shelf not that far from the cash register.

Photo by Kubik. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

His reaction was charming. Polite,
engaged, initially a little nervous. It
was flattering, but at that time in my career, a few people were familiar with
my books (mostly Dragonlance readers, who tended to see me as a minor
celebrity, whether they liked or hated my work, and it was one or the other
back then). So I was used to a little
deference, the slightest star-struck demeanor, though it now happens less than
once in a couple of years, and I am always astonished when it does these

days. I talked to Dave briefly, and then
he asked me to join him for dinner and some beers with several of his graduate
school friends from the University of Kent.
He was nice and gracious and very, very smart, so it seemed like a fun
possibility.

I joined Dave, then, and his friends Matt and Martine, for a graduate
school fare of beer and pizza, and for happy conversation that lasted into the
late hours. I remember being flattered
by their attentions—partly because being regarded as a professional novelist
was new to me, and also because at home, the full-time faculty and the graduate
students I brushed against in the university were dismissive of fantasy
fiction, and it was the first group of academics who seemed to believe I had
street cred.

All in all, it was a friendly encounter with some good college kids. Matt and Martine seemed to be a couple, and
Dave spoke lovingly of his girlfriend in Japan.
We parted happy to have met each other: Dave and I both agreed that our
chance meeting and hours together had been the highlight of our summer. We would correspond briefly after I returned
to the States, but like 99% of overseas encounters, we lost touch after an
exchange of a couple of notes.

Until, of course, I made the connection between the ardent, bright
student and the novelist he had become.
And for a few days at first I was, I hate to admit, a green leafy face
of envy.

You see, David Mitchell has my job.
The one I had in mind for myself years ago. A serious writer (and by any definition he is
that) and one who has been able to make more than a living from his work. A house in Ireland, a way of life that seemed
to me glamorous when I began to write, and still has an enticing gleam to it as
I write this.

But it never happened with me. Thirteen
novels now, some well-reviewed, but farther from making a living than seemed
possible when that first book, Weasel’s Luck, was released to sales I never
expected, even in my pipe dreams. By the standards I set for myself almost
thirty years ago I’m a failure: mid-shelf writer, untenured professor subject annually
to the budgetary whims of a finance-strapped university, passed over for
promotions on several occasions. Was I not smart enough? I ask myself. Not talented
enough? Too lazy? Unlucky in where I grew up? Unwise in my professional choices? Probably yes to all of these questions.

So much for the visions of a young man—how the life turns from what you
thought it would be to what it is. I
think that if any of us looked back thirty years, dredging up the images of our
ambition (“What will you be like 30 years from now?”), we all aim high.

But we’re aiming at the wrong thing.
Notice I said that my envy lasted “for a few days.” After which, I faced some hard truths.

David Mitchell’s artistry and hard work have won a deserving place in
life. Something in myself or my
circumstances gave me my road, my station today as a writer. And what is important is the process of
delight in the work: I still love putting words on the page, teaching students
in a classroom. And if that work goes
unacknowledged, that’s not what is important finally. If you’re the Black Prince and not a king,
there’s more than enough glory in your battles and your victories. If you’re not a prince but a feudal peasant,
same rules apply: your battles and victories remain your own, so fight the good
fight and enjoy the combat—physical, mental, imaginative, spiritual, no matter
the terrain. At one level the green men’s
presence may mock you, but at that level they mock us all: in the passage of
years all works vanish, and I realize it’s up to me to do the work given me, to
do it when and where it matters.

I never stopped wishing David all the goodness he seemed and seems to
deserve. I celebrate him and his next
novel. I know the forest beckons, that
eventually all green men go back and hide, but I’m in this goodly light for a
while to come.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

The design of the Duomo in Milan is more northern, more
gothic than its counterparts I have seen in Florence and Turin. There a more Romanesque style greets
you—astonishing in Florence, as you emerge from narrow Renaissance streets onto
a piazza where the cathedral greets you with not only its beauty but its
imposing size, which you encounter like some divine manifestation.

The approach to
Milan’s Duomo is more like that to Turin’s, where you see the cathedral from a
distance, like a pilgrim might have seen it in the past, and the approach to it
sets your thoughts on holy ground. In
the holy forest.

In comparison with the cathedrals of Florence and Turin, the
stone of this church is pale, almost white.
The movement of its architecture is highly vertical: its spires twist
like ascending tree boles or descending vines, and this before Carlo had
provided the metaphor.

I had always been told that the medieval cathedral was an
imitation of the city of God presented in the Book of the Apocalypse (or the
Book of Revelations). To think of it as
a forest is to draw from a whole new series of associations. There were things I noticed (and things I
didn’t) that the forest metaphor went a distance in explaining.

The vault of the cathedral, extraordinarily high, is like a canopy of trees, and this instantly made me think of Lorien in Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings. Furthermore, as Carlo
was to explain, the columns of the cathedral were not equidistant, their disproportion
accomplishing two things: the irregularity was about movement more than stasis,
the columns’ asymmetry is not apparent unless you go in looking for it, and the
slightest disproportions are used to guide the pilgrim’s or worshiper’s eye subliminally
toward the altar. Moreover, it recalls the medieval comparison of earthly life
to travel through the wilderness (remember, that’s where Dante starts in The Divine Comedy), but this is a
wilderness transformed, shot through with the prismatic light of God, through
which its particular and small
imperfections are made perfect in the whole of the design, much as (I am
guessing) the intentional “flaws” in Japanese pottery reflect how natural
things are skewed in particular, but amount to an overall sense of coherence
and wholeness.

And so it reminded me of Lorien. How the Fellowship had endured much already,
wanderings in inclement weather and over terrain that ended up being
impassable—ended up sending them on the dangerous journey through the Mines of
Moria, through battle with their enemies and the loss (apparently final to
their despairing eyes) of their leader Gandalf.
It was in Lorien, in a holy and still forest, that they were harbored,
nurtured, and redirected.

And that, to me, is the heart’s core of things. To harbor and nurture and redirect. Tolkien’s work is my most loved book, as most
of you know, and it is the book that, in ways, defined my spiritual posture
toward the world. Lorien was a place in The Fellowship that resonated with me, that
was curiously more my idea of heaven than the versions the church had taught me
in preceding years. Lorien was a
readying for more adventure: it was not a stasis alone, but a readying for more
of the quest. The pillars were
asymmetrical there, and its colonnades, like those in the Duomo, suggested at movement. An idea of heaven that I like in this moment
on earth: I’d like to be at rest and also headed somewhere, and though the
eventual goal may be a more absolute stasis, the journey and the beauties and
perils it holds seem like a heaven I’d set my sights on.

The climb to the roof
of the Duomo is steep, but comprised of landings where you can pause, gather
yourself, and continue. And the view
from its apex, as Milan extends itself around and below you as you stand like
vigilant angels or sentried elves, is a kind of repose in itself, but no
stasis, not yet. Breathing a little
hard, I took in the city, and the moment atop the cathedral seemed to me kind
of like the place T.S. Eliot talks about in “Burnt Norton”:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

My friend Carlo is
Milanese, his family going back for generations in that impressive city. We were lucky to have him as a guide on a
Sunday this late spring, when it was a day of churches and sights ranging from
the picturesque to the breathtaking.

As the second largest
city in Italy, Milan sprawls like its North American counterparts. It feels in ways more “modern” than
Rome. Its business and fashion
centrality may account in some ways for the stylish dress and the astonishing
physical beauty of many of the young adults I saw as Carlo steered us through
the streets of the central city. Indeed,
the first encounter with things Milanese had been before we were reunited with
our friends: we had shared a train compartment with two young Israeli women,
one civil and polite, the other model-lovely and absolutely refusing to shift
her entourage of luggage so that we could fit comfortably in our seats.

Things moved uphill
from that rude introduction, which took place, granted, before our arrival, and
frankly had little to do with the graciousness and hospitality that Carlo and
his family would show us. I believe,
though, that there is a kind of heartlessness to beauty and wealth, and perhaps
we admire them both because something in us is ready to acknowledge that both
beauty and wealth are all too willing to exclude us. But maybe this was a lens through which I
unfairly glimpsed Milan now and then, born out of reading and film and popular
culture, because our welcome was warm, with good food, good wine, and the humor
of one of the wittiest of my friends.

Wit, by the way, can
have about it a whiff of heartlessness, too—an odd part of its attraction, I
think. There’s a cruelty, for example,
in a number of Wilde’s more brilliant observations that makes us gasp and laugh
at the same time, and part of the laughter comes from the fact that we have
gasped and caught the mean streak in the comedy. But wit becomes amiable and benign—becomes
gracious and graceful—when it is
generous while remaining sharp, and appreciative of the same qualities in
others. That is a European wit at its
best: in America there’s an edge of one-up, of the cutting remark made by
someone running with scissors. But none
of that was at our dinner table that night in Milan: Carlo is impossible to
keep up with in matters of wit, but he makes you feel entirely at home when you
make the effort.

Bear with me. I am not simply praising a friendship. I have something to say that applies to the
Basilica San’Ambrogio.

A convivial night
turned into a morning that was brisk but not hectic. We hopped a bus that took us into the center
of the old city, where we attended Mass at this Basilica, a 12th
century church that sits comfortably with the Roman structures acknowledged
from its foundation (after all, the city was the Roman Mediolanum after it
passed from Celtic hands, and the ruins underlie the medieval and Renaissance
plan of the town). Part of the genius, I
think, of medieval Christianity lies in those moments when it looks the
Classical tradition square in the face and does not forget its beauty and its
humanized scale. The church’s arcade is
like something out of Rome, and directly outside of the cloister is the Colonna
del Diavolo—the Devil’s Column.

The story has it that
San’Ambrogio defended himself from Satan’s attack at this very spot. It seems the saint pushed the devil against
the column, and Old Nick got stuck the

re, lodged in the stone when his
diabolical horns pierced it. It was
further believed that you could smell sulfur coming from the holes, and Carlo
told us that if you placed your ear against the column, you could hear the
sounds that emanated from hell itself. Which
was why you see Rhonda listening at the column, because her faith and goodness
of heart would be proof against infernal influence. I, on the other hand, stood at some distance
beside Carlo, and though one of the principal Milanese tourist sites observes
laconically that The holes that were once
present have been recently filled in, I wouldn’t trust that all the ways to
hell are sealed.

The other churches we
would see that day—San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore and, of course, the Duomo
di Milano, were more impressive in their lavish beauty. They will be the subject of two later
entries. But the smaller—and in some
ways plainer—Basilica had, in its hybrid and humbler structure a kind of beauty
that eludes the colder magnificence I was to see elsewhere in the city. It reflected our hosts and embodied one of
the better gifts I received from the city of Milan—that beneath its opulence
lay its quiet and more intimate humanity.

Monday, June 15, 2015

The first time we went
to Courmayeur ended, to be honest, in a
number of disappointments.

The little village
near the base of Mont Blanc was, at least on the Italian side of the mountain,
the point from which you could ascend the famous mountain—at least high up its
slope—by funicular. It was a promising
prospect, but the first time we went there, back in May 2014, we were waylaid
by the ATM machine.

Italy is a country
where the commerce of shops and restaurants is less…credit-intensive than at
home. And though, as we were to discover
later, the people who ran the funicular up the side of the mountain were more
than willing to accept VISA, our way from Courmayeur to La Palud where the lift
began was a good 4 km away by a bus that was cash only. So we had reached the end of our road for the
day, quite literally.

Let down but not all
that distressed, we spent some time wandering through the pedestrian areas of
the town, its streets picturesque almost (but not quite) to the point of being dull. It struck me as a kind of “movie Switzerland,”
a little more tidied and boutiqued than I was inclined to enjoy, but not a bad
place

for a few hours’ lingering. Since this was a Sunday, and since it was the
middle of May, two weeks or so past the
end to Courmayeur’s principal
tourist season, we were a little out of luck even in falling back on
traditional touristry: half of the shops were closed, and a number of the more
interesting regional restaurants didn’t keep Sunday hours.

Lunch ended up as pizza,
which I seldom mind, especially in Italy, but the one I order included a raw egg as one of the
toppings—something more interesting to see than to think about or eat, and a
reminder to me that a very rudimentary grasp of the language is occasionally
not enough when you’re trying to negotiate a menu.

But it was right
before we went home that our financial inconvenience became a little more than
just inconvenient. Became, in fact, embarrassing.

Rhonda wasn’t feeling
that good, so we stopped in a little café for some pastry and coffee. The snack served and finished, I discovered
to my dismay that the place didn’t accept credit cards, either. A stumbling explanation in bad Italian brought
out a manager—a young man name Luca—whose English and generosity were more than
my ignorance deserved that afternoon. In
short, we had the coffee and pastry gratis, and I would remember his kindness
in the coming year, starting from the moment our bus headed back to Aosta, on board
two passengers defeated at the low levels of global finance by inexperience and
bad luck.

Needless to say, we
set upon ourselves to right some wrongs when it came to Courmayeur. A return trip, we decided, to ascend the
mountain. I announced as much in my
Facebook status:

Headed to Courmayeur this
morning, then an ascent of Mont Blanc. No, not with piton and rope, but in safe
vehicles in which you can stop for coffee at dizzying heights. My kind of
adventure these days.

So much of my
prediction was (once again) wrong. Which calls for a little commentary, beyond
simply advising other travelers never to predict how the day will go.

“Safe vehicles” was, I
believe, more or less accurate. The
funicular turned out to be less like the stately one we had ridden in Ljubljana
roughly a year before: shaky with bumps and scrapes, crowded with German skiers
(and their skis), but all in all not death-defying, so yes, that would pass for
“safe”. And “stopping for coffee at
dizzying heights” was true as well—perhaps even better, in that we had lunch
with a view at a place called Summit 3842, where excellent polenta made amends
for sausage that was so-so, and the view, though intermittent because of cloud
and mist, ended up trumping it all.

It was what lay in
between that I hadn’t bargained on. 228
stairs, straight up and steep, no landings on which to lean or even
collapse. Even the skiers around us were
panting. It was my daily workout—perhaps
my weekly one—and reaching the top, winded and sweaty, I had to allow that the
food up there tasted better for the exertion, the view more beautiful because
it was earned. It was a couch-potato
version of my own Mont Blanc climb, and laugh at me if you will, I was still
able to make my climb without aid of piton or Sherpa.

And the view. You understand Shelley:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales
between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps

All natural drama and
cataract and grandeur. Extraordinary
beauty made even more beautiful because it’s on a scale where we don’t figure
in. Indifferent Nature , the world
before us and after us. A kind of
curious face to face with the Romantic Sublime—Edmund Burke and all that bunch,
and knowing that our footprint is so light upon the mountains that they would
be indifferent to our feelings of smallness and of insignificance.

It’s hard to come down
from those heights without a little humility.
Another form of which was on my mind as we parted. I returned to the little café, 10 euros in
hand, intending a year-late payment of my debt.
The place was more bustling this time, having set up a gelato bar. An amiable, tall Frenchman who managed the
place let me know that Luca was gone now.
Time had passed, it seemed, regardless of the places in which my memory
had stopped. The new manager graciously
declined my repayment, thanking me for remembering and considering, and
returning with the intent to make old debts good. It’s something you can never quite do, at
least not in the way you intended: but the sublime is better, more humanized,
when it contains good will.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Something about port towns asks for a different aesthetic,
and Genoa demands its own terms entirely.
Its harbor widens into the Mediterranean, of course, and its place by
the sea has almost entirely dominated its history. The Genoese were famous as navigators and
sailors, and their banking and financial community rivaled that of Venice,
their neighbor and rival on the other side of Italy.

Going to Genoa would prove to be a great adventure, because
for once I had no idea of what would greet me.
My images of other Italian cities I have visited—of course Rome and
Florence, but also Turin and Milan and Venice—had been shaped beforehand by the
things I had read, but Genoa was fresh to me;
I knew the salami and Christopher Columbus, but little else.

We got off the train at Genoa Piazza Principe, the main
station in the town. It was built in the
mid-nineteenth century, and it was only upon our return that I would get a
good glimpse of its exterior—marbled and squat and beautifully sturdy, as
though somehow solidity counted for a unique beauty in this decaying city. Our hosts Anna and Carlo met us right off the
train: Anna dear to us for some time, Carlo her boyfriend soon to be a welcome
addition to our circle of friends. We
walked immediately into the heart of the town, and almost as immediately, I
felt that it was unlike the other Italian cities I had visited.

The city slopes up from its harbor at the same steep angles
I had seen before in San Francisco and in Wellington, New Zealand. But the age makes a difference: Wellington,
though set on perhaps the steepest incline, is a sloping city of parks and open
spaces, and San Francisco has a certain consistency of architecture, all its
beauty residing in its nineteenth-century buildings and its gracious pact
between Victorian charm and modernity.

Genoa is quite a different character. Yes, it has some of the alluring seediness of
a place like Venice—another city that gathered its power and reputation through
sea commerce, from medieval times to the present. But if you were to liken the two cities to,
say, a pair of old courtesans, still shimmering in rich decay, Venice would be
the one who had better preserved her looks, either through cosmetics or some
lucky genetic gift. But Genoa was far and away the one who was better company,
filled with good stories and shady transactions.

The streets of this city bristled with a canny, subversive
life, and today it was overcast, the rain imminent. Right from the start I saw the street
vendors—not unusual in any Italian city, but more prevalent here, and perhaps
more aggressive. There were a number of
Africans, migrants from what were no doubt desperate circumstances on that
troubled continent, selling bead bracelets and small, cheaply carved
animals. There were also the Romani
(Americans generally know them as “gypsies,” a term most of them resent); and
then, quite common, the native Italian beggars, who migrate from table to table
at the cafes, pleading insistently (and sometimes at great length). Our
friend Carlo, who seemed a calmly quiet young man, refused one beggar again and
again, and yet again as we had coffee in a Genoan piazza. I could see that, eventually, even his
extensive patience was taxed, and I wondered how porous the “safety net” might
be Italy, since a whole subterranean world seems built on a kind of drifter
culture, especially in the slow, seedy climate of the port town.

It wasn’t long until, almost reluctantly, we were shown the statue. Christopher Columbus was honored rather late
in Genoese history, with the monument erected roughly 150 years ago. A deeply romanticized portrait,
Columbus like someone out of a Byronic poem, his hand resting on a “subdued
Indian maiden,” as some descriptions would have it. The sight was uncomfortable, and when you put
it together with the street-vending refugees and vagabonds, you couldn’t help
thinking that it all tied together ultimately—that the glamour of the city had
kept its shifty undercurrent for centuries, and where other cities had found
ways to make street life less visible, Genoa had kept it in a noticeable
tension somehow as part of the picture.
It was a city that showed you the shadier side of the mercantile and
capitalist economies in its balance with beautiful palaces and architecture. Where American mythology would blame the
beggars, and where the Left would blame the dukes in the palaces, Genoa set the
whole picture before you with an Italian shrug:
è quello che è, or “it is what
it is”—a maddening, cliché phrase to the American ear, but particularly apt in
this complex city.

To please the tourists, the powers
that be had dyed pink the water of the fountain at the Piazza Ferrari.Anna and Carlo were mildly horrified, I
think, by what was certainly a gilding of the urban lily, but we, of course,
were those tourists in question, sucked in by the coat of paint, and also with
little girls waiting at home, whose favorite colors were pink and purple.So we took the photograph.And it was only later that it occurred to me
how this publicity stunt brushed against the edges of marketing—presented a
place in a manufactured prettiness, when its real beauty lay in something more
harsh and compromised and durable.

“Are you shocked?” Anna would ask
me later, as we passed through a narrow, Renaissance alley on our way to her
flat.The dark, cramped passage was the
haunt of Genoese prostitutes.Prostitution is open in Genoa, although technically illegal: the women
work the daylight hours, standing in little alcoves off the alleys and the older,
narrower streets.Indeed, there was
little to shock in the arrangement, unless it was how policy conflicted with
practice.Again, the city’s conflict
between a nebulous idea (perhaps put forth in generations of advertising and
tourism committees) and the essential heart and spirit of the city, rougher
than any travel guide and yet alluring, an unabashed, unsentimental landscape
in a long Italian history of maritime commerce.

Friday, June 5, 2015

I would imagine that in our time, with the exceptions
of Rome and Jerusalem, Turin has become the most frequent destination of the
Christian pilgrim.After all, it is the
Duomo of Turin, the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista that holds the famous Shroud.

And
for Rhonda, and a little bit for me, we found ourselves moved in the middle of
May on a pilgrimage of sorts, to view an artifact that I doubt and that she
thinks might be.

Yes,
there are nuances and details, spaces between my skepticism and her
entertaining possibilities.She’s a good
Catholic girl, and I am one of those people not hardwired for belief, but this would have something to do with the
both of us, we figured, so we left Turin’s Porta Susa—a long and horizontal
(and disappointingly immaculate) train station in the western part of the city,
bound for the cathedral by a meandering city bus.

Perhaps
on trips like this, the pilgrim attunes his mind to approaches.Perhaps it was why the passengers on the bus
volunteered to locate our stop for us, an older man signaling well beforehand
the prossima fermata virtually in
front of the Duomo.As always, a simple
and benign prego to our thanks, the
helpful and genuine friendliness of everyone we encountered from the train
station to the presence of the Shroud a testament to civility at the least, to
the courtesy of this solid and open city.

Turin struck
my imagination as a city of piazzas and colonnades.Of course, you could say the same of many of
the large Italian cities, but somehow in Turin this arrangement called
attention to itself, nowhere so strikingly as around the Duomo.There sat the major cathedral of the city,
San Giovanni Batista, blockish and externally plain when compared with its counterparts
in Florence and Milan, tented and scaffolded in parts by the continual
reconstruction you see around the monuments of this country.Hugging a brick wall to our right, we walked
a block or so and turned right, as we had been guided, toward the Giardini
Real, the expansive park that abuts the cathedral and the Palazzo Real, the
grand palace of the city.

It was here
that the pilgrimage began in full, and the shops lining the streets—not simply
the cramped, provisional booths selling photographs and wall-hangings of the
Shroud (and even, on one occasion, a splendidly blasphemous dish towel), but
also more respectable shops, it seemed, their wares a bit more permanent and a
lot more expensive.This was the stuff
of medieval pilgrimage, where like the 1st century Temple in
Jerusalem itself, part of the space was ceded to Mammon.

This mercenary
part of the journey didn’t bother me.Perhaps it was my cynicism, in full flourish since we had learned that
the Shroud itself, not its replica double, would be on display this summer in
Italy.At the time we discovered this, I
remember thinking, “And the difference is…?” Because it makes no difference if
the original Shroud is not the Shroud,
I thought.What, after all, could
distinguish one version from another when both are images of some imagined thing,
a representation of a collective desire for something to be more than it is?

Here we were
on the sidewalk now, passing booths will all kinds of food—nourishment for the
pilgrims, no doubt, though the sandwich of Sicilian sausage could also have
been something more than it was.The
highlight of the movement through the booths was a young vendor selling
pastries, who told me, in impeccable and subversive English, “That will be one
hundred dollars.We fill them with
diamonds, you know.”

We had been
told to expect hours of waiting.The day
was warm, and the prospect seemed miserable to me, as the one thing I hate more
than lines is hot weather, but as we passed through a friendly but thorough
security check and into a tented walkway, the temperature was not unpleasant
and we seemed to be moving at an unanticipated pace.All around us were languages we did not
speak: I hear Italian, of course, but French and German as well.I heard the recognizable inflections of
American English, but missed the words in our surprisingly swift movement in
the queue.

We were bound
toward shadows together, I thought.And
for some reason, it was no Biblical verse that came to mind, but the last lines
of Bergman’s Seventh Seal:

They move away
from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands while the rain
cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears.

Toward the dark lands we hastened, now being divided into
small groups.I clung to Rhonda out of
the silly fear that the ushers would somehow divide us, and we would enter the
presence of the Shroud separately, losing each other in the crowded
shadows.Fortunately, nothing like that
was remotely possible, and we entered the cool dank air of the Duomo and were
guided to a long, illumined display that I first mistook for the Shroud itself
until, on closer approach, it was evident that what stood in front of us was a
photograph.A display in several
languages described the Shroud for us, pointing out—almost like a lecturer’s
highlighting, complete with pointer and magnified
slides, the visual evidence marshalled for a crucified body, lacerated and
pierced in the hands, feet, and side.

When you knew
where to look, you were prepared for the viewing. Even the pastries are filled with diamonds.

Into the
hushed darkness we were guided, cautioned against flash photography, of course (sh the attached picture of the Shroud is not my own). This attention to protocol intensified the shadow, made it a place outside of place, the courteous whispers of elderly ladies
arranging us in rows and tiers before the famous artifact.I thought of Rudolf Otto’s
famous definition of the numinous: mysterium
tremendum et fascinans. The idea of the holy as mysterious, inspiring fear
or awe and yet drawing in or attracting the beholder, and doing both at the
same time.

Beyond a
ranging curiosity, seeing something that you owe it to yourself to see if it is
on display, I confess to having no sense of the numinous on the fabric.Yet in the hush of the room, the devotion was
palpable: what these fifty people or so had carried with them from the reaches
of the city, the continent, perhaps the world.To some, this was the grail at the end of a journey, and to say, as has
become customary, that it was the journey that mattered more than the
arrival—well, that’s presumptuous, to tell this assembly of the devoted what
meaning they were to gather in the presence of the Shroud and, even more presumptuously,
how they were to gather it.As for me, I
needed no artifact to notice that the quiet around me was welcoming, that
unlike the religion I have often encountered in my experience of coming up, of
my struggles with a faith in the fifty years before I sat it aside at last,
this was a quiet that beckoned me in with no agenda and a simple, abiding
silence.It seemed like a place at the
table I might have taken had it been offered, or had I seen it, years ago.

Monday, June 1, 2015

Note: This to be used as the head of a section to a proposed book of travel writings.

There’s a quote from
Baudelaire I’ve always found funny: apparently, when asked why he didn’r write
any nature poetry, his answer was simple and direct: “I don’t worship
vegetables.” Just the right amount of
bluntness and smart-assery that reveals a genuine creature of the city.

The city is, for many
of us, the landscape of record. I didn’t
grow up where that was the case: my two principal childhood homes were suburban
and country, and the circles of my travels seem to take me back to small
towns—places of mixed blessings that seem to be where I settle, as a rule. But I believe the city is the arena in which
the drama and situations of the 21st century inevitably take place,
and I believe there is nothing particularly fresh or insightful in saying that.

As far as I know, the
city became the center of the Modern soul about the time it became a character
in imaginative literature. For all the
Romantics’ infatuation with Nature, you have old Willie Blake writing Songs of Innocence and Experience in the
height of their heyday, and you can’t imagine those poems outside an urban
setting. The city pervades them, even
the crazy visionary stuff, but “London” and the Chimney Sweep poems are shot
through with the dirt and noise and claustrophobia that would enter our
imaginations for the next two centuries.
There’s Dickens, and Baudelaire like I mentioned. And Joyce, and Eliot, and Kafka. Yes, lots of writers tried to get out of
town, but so many stories begin and end in the city these days: we are
condensed, overpopulated, forced to live and die in the presence of each other.

But it isn’t as bleak
as that. In Milan only a week ago, I
again brushed against the ideas of the Italian Futurists—Marinetti and Boccioni
and their celebration of the art of machinery and noise and combustion. Too bad some of them filtered that passion
into Fascism, because they were certainly on to something in the human spirit. We love the new, the brilliant and
violent. We love the crash and clamor of
things, especially when we’re young, but in my case some of the affections
lingered into middle age, so here I am—part of me Futurist, while another part
romances the past and the layers of cities.

And as character in
modern fiction, cities in modern times take on personality. You get to know them gradually: at first they
are mysteries, broad stereotypes of what you have sometimes heard,
perhaps. For me, the cities often take
shape through what I have read: I cannot imagine Prague, for example, other
than through the lens of Franz Kafka, although in doing so, I no doubt miss the
city on a number of levels. As it
reveals itself through exceptions to type, the city unfolds slowly and with
nuance, like Molly Bloom or Quentin Compson, and you acquaint yourself in
stages, learning streets and districts and skylines as you might countenance
and expression.

So this entry is
intended to head up a section of my travel writings called Visible Cities. The homage is obvious: Calvino’s book Invisible Cities is one of the most
beautiful things written in the 20th century, and I owe him much
more than a title. Calvino’s cities were drawn as rich prose poems, fantasies
on ideas and on the way we organize, construct, and give meaning to the raw
materials around us. No wonder he used the
city: it is always a chaos almost always struggling to become something:
experts on chaos theory (of which I am certainly not one) claim that it is the
only way to explain the traffic patterns of cities, and since that assertion
requires a knowledge of physics above my pay grade, I will just assume they
have a point, and that the city’s disorder was a kind of vehicle for larger,
more conceptual orders that Calvino managed to discover in its parts and unruly
complications.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

It’s a roundabout five miles or so from my doorstep to the
Ten Thousand Buddhas Summit Monastery.
The road there leaves Corydon and slips onto the Old Forest Road (for a
Tolkien student, the perfect road on which to leave the familiar). From there, it winds over farmlands, reaches
an unforeseen fork and takes a left, dipping between small houses and trailers,
past a house complete with car-pursuing border collie (it happens every time:
he lurks by the fence row waiting), then takes a left on Mathis Road, where a
pair of broken-down barns announce your final turn—a mile-long driveway,
rain-rutted and muddy, impassable for a goodly third of the year as it ascends
toward the sprawling little complex where the monks live.

The first time there, back in the spring of 2013, we missed the final turn. The sign for the monastery is a painted arrow
on a boulder at the foot of the drive, but it is only visible from one direction, and
the direction wasn’t ours. So we wandered
for ten minutes up Mathis Road until it was all but clear that we had missed
the turn-off. On the way back, we saw it
easily, turned and started the climb.

I am sure there are not ten thousand Buddhas at the crest of
the hill. Do we count the statues? the sangha
(the Buddhist community)? a combination of both, or another form of reckoning?

Whatever the case, what does greet the traveler is an array
of statues, fifty or sixty Buddhas, perhaps, in inviting postures of calm and
welcome. Coming up the hill for the
first time was a kind of coming home—not in any profound sense of conversion or
epiphany, because I’ve always been secular, skeptical, and (I hate to admit)
perhaps even cynical when it comes to religious matters. No, this homecoming was something more in the
country of imagination and emotion, that feeling that you get when, after a
long trip, you reach your own threshold, and the tension of wandering slides
away and you feel that you can rest here, can put up your feet.

It was a feeling that surprised me, stripped of all but a
residual spirituality—the call of the soul that a writer feels mid-novel. For the thing that had brought me to the
monastery was research—nothing academic or theological, but the kind of
research all my novelist friends know about, the creation of the experience, of
presence in a place, of paying attention to the senses as they take in what is
around them. In this case it was the
glow off the white ceramic statuary, the smell of the surrounding forest and a
faint undercurrent of sandalwood incense.

And most of all, the profound quiet of the place. But more of that in a moment.

I was a few chapters into my work in progress, working title
Ghost Month. One of the novel’s heroes
was turning out to be what I characterized at first as a “rock star Buddhist”—a
Westerner with a sentimental attachment to the media image of Eastern
serenity. What happens, though, as a
novel unfolds, is that a character surprises you; it became apparent early on
that Dominic, in order to be anything beyond a shallow dilettante, would have
learned something or other about the religion he embraced.

I knew then I would have to brush against Buddhism in a way
that was a bit more than a passing acquaintance. So I began an internet search for nearby
monasteries or centers, and with surprise (and a little embarrassment at my own
ignorance) discovered the Summit Monastery not fifteen minutes away. Hence the winding drive, the few minutes of
being lost, and the arrival at this spot in the midst of this quiet.

The silence, oddly, did not carry with it a sense of removal. I had grown up in a wide array of settings—city,
suburbia, military post, and farm. And I
was reminded of my grandfather’s farm, the sloping field and the pond, behind
it a still ten acres of woods. A
surprising sense of safety amid those trees, the high-pitched, percussive call
of a cardinal and the ratcheting of cicadas.
It was all sound you could rest in, comfortable with the nearby road and
the passage of the everyday.

But with your feet on pavement, your thoughts could return to these woods. It reminded my of something in Wordsworth, when the young man thought over his recollections of Tintern Abbey:

Oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration...

And it was later, not with Wordsworth's eloquence but with a gratitude to that eloquence, to that other monastery up in the Indiana hills and to the journey that had taken me there, I began to assemble my own thoughts and decided I would go back--this time, not simply as a matter of research. Ultimately to make
it a regular journey.

Over two years have passed since that first encounter. I make regular trips to the Summit Monastery to meditate with the Rev. Thich Hang Dat, who has become friend and mentor in the interim. And my understanding of what happened there that first time has changed in two years.

My failures of
faith have been numberless—side roads taken hopefully, leading to dislocation
and disappointment, steep roads I was too lazy to endure, roads through unsightly
and mean country that I figured could not lead to where I was headed. Whatever the case, the monastery settled in
my later thoughts, I hope not superficially because I return to it again and
again, practice the meditation I began there, consider it a wayside spot of
sustenance and odd peace.